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Dad Says Meteorite Hit His Son

byKaitlin StanfordNov 27, 2013

Seven-year-old Steven Lippard of Loxahatchee, Fla., was playing in his driveway last Saturday when suddenly, out of nowhere, something dropped out of the sky—and hit him right in the head. No, it wasn't a nut falling from a tree, or even a bird dropping off a "gift." It was something hard enough to leave a gash and send poor Steven to the hospital for staples.

When he got home, Steven's dad Wayne went to investigate just what it was that fell from the sky, after all. (“Maybe it was a golf ball or maybe it was debris from the landing gear of a plane,” his dad later said he wondered.)

But after scouring the driveway, Steven's dad turned up something quite different: a handful of small rocks, each about the size of a pea or smaller. Wayne said they were laying in a 3-foot diameter formation and didn’t look like any others he saw in his large driveway.

Now, most parents might just leave it at that and chalk it up to a random accident that could have been caused millions of ways. But instead, Wayne got curious, and started to think: What if these rocks actually came from outer space?

While that may sound pretty nutty, Wayne did take the rocks to be tested at the Florida Atlantic University. And while they weren't exactly equipped to test for meteorites at that time, they did determine that the fragments were magnetic (which is a sign that they could be).

If the meteor theory is true, looks like little Steven was one lucky kid. Though from what his dad says, he doesn't seem to be too worried about the possibility of being struck by meteors.

“He talks about it all the time, he thinks it’s cool,” Wayne said. “But he could’ve been killed. It hit cement and shattered; it grazed him.”